After a conservative federal Texas judge issued a ruling declaring the Affordable Care Act (ACA) “invalid” last week, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (D) and the 16 other attorneys general that led the case are planning to appeal. While the White House applauded the decision in the Northern District of Texas, Herring said the fight to protect federal healthcare insurance “isn’t over.”
“This is an absolute disgrace and it’s brought to you by a President and Republican AGs more interested in scoring political points than protecting Americans,” Herring said on Twitter. “They’re playing games with Americans’ lives and healthcare, but this fight isn’t over. Not by a long shot.”
As one of the most ardent elected officials in Virginia with animus against the Trump Administration, Herring also challenged the federal government on the rollback of environmental protections in the automotive industry. As well, he has been working along side the liberal left that has placed legal hurdles and federal courts in the way of the construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) and the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). Herring has now been tacked with a lawsuit for his alleged efforts to bring aboard climate litigators funded by former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg to prosecute in-state environmental offenses.
Regardless, this is not the first time Herring has dealt with healthcare lawsuits in his second term as Virginia’s chief lawyer.
Months ago, the former Northern Virginia state senator filed a motion to dismiss a federal lawsuit that invoked sweeping challenges of numerous state restrictions on abortion. Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights advocacy groups petitioned against the Commonwealth’s licensing rules for abortion providers – laws that require all second-trimester abortions to be performed in hospitals, limiting the practice to licensed doctors, and mandatory ultrasounds with a 24-hour waiting period before a woman undergoes an abortion.
Interestingly, Herring, who just announced that he is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2021, claimed that the questions at hand in the case were “legislative and not judicial.” His effort to dismiss the case protected abortion rights providers from a conservative Supreme Court, giving the decision back to the state legislature, in which Republicans have a razor-thin, one-member majority.